All businesses sell products. Whatever they might be—a laptop, a phone, groceries, a trip to the Bahamas, dinner in a restaurant—anything that someone pays money for is a product. Or so we all thought. I am about to argue that your product is not a product. Your product is, in fact, an experience. Think about [...]

‘I don’t remember forgetting I don’t seem to recall If I neglected to show you I love you I don’t remember at all.’ Ricky Skaggs Anyone who’s been in a relationship for more than, oh, a fortnight has learned the link between memory and caring. Forget to call: you clearly don’t care. Don’t remember that [...]

“I wish they would only take me as I am” – Vincent Van Gogh Personas are essential to Customer Experience Management. It’s a given that good design begins with understanding the design target. A Persona nets-out as a “word portrait” of a customer type, distilling the essential elements of a market segment. The richer and more [...]

There’s a term trending on Twitter at the moment that makes me shake my head and smile a little. Why didn’t I see that coming? It’s ‘Big Process’  (#bigprocess) and I find the tweets by Clay Richardson really interesting. Now, I had no clue what this could mean, so my mind was running in all [...]

Some questions for customer service and customer experience managers to think about… What if: your agents could follow the right process, just as you had designed it? your agents didn’t have to ALT_TAB through 15 applications on their desktop? your agents didn’t have to use Post-it notes or index cards or refer to training manuals? [...]

I may very possibly be the last to blog on the theme of technology trends and predictions for 2012 with every blogger worthy of a following already having done so (and before 2012 actually arrived). But in my role at KANA, this is not something I think about only at New Year. On the contrary, [...]

Business process management (BPM) has largely focused on making business processes more efficient and agile. It provides tools and methodologies to achieve this goal. BPM is quite valuable for back office processes where the processes can be well defined and there is not much customer interaction. BPM ensures consistency in the back office processes but [...]

A friend of mine recently found himself in the middle of a terrible customer service experience. He’s a systems engineer and two of the servers he was supporting had failed with the same error. The production system was down, and the client was looking for a quick resolution. He immediately called the customer support line [...]

I recently completed my first half-marathon. I am not a regular runner but decided to participate in “Rock ‘n’ Roll” marathon in San Jose. It sounded like a fun thing to do. I did prepare for about five months and was quite ready for the challenge. What I didn’t expect was that running this race [...]

Sure, Gordon Ramsay is too good looking, seems to bask in celebrity, acts like a rude sod, and teaches management by intimidation. But, if, as one suspects, his eponymous London showpiece reflects the man, you gotta like him. Ramsay runs a terrific restaurant. No, we’re not talking French Laundry or Joel Robuchon here, my standards [...]